Sunday, August 21, 2016

77,777 Postcards on Colnect!

In the beginning of this year we have marked reaching 66,666 Postcards on the Colnect catalog. It's now summer, the year not even entering its final season, and the Postcards catalog has already reached its new impressive milestone of 
77,777 Postcards on the catalog!
"Rila. Seven Lakes of Rila" 1982 Bulgaria Postcard, from the Colnect catalog
We would like to thank the wonderful coordinators of the Postcards category, Vadym Sulimenko [Dravec] and Grzegorz Pająk [quarteris]. Their dedicated work developing the catalog is keeping it beautiful, updated and more and more complete every year.
"Alexei Leonov. The docking of Soyuz and Apollo. 1977" Soviet Union, USSR 1987 Postcard, from the Colnect catalog
We would also like to thank all the dedicated help of all postcards editors and contributors that have helped add over 11,111 postcards this year.
"Seven sunset. Kamchatka, Kluchevskiy park" Russia 2014 Postcards, from the Colnect catalog
256 Countries are featured on the catalog. The countries with most added postcards since the last milestone are Soviet Union, USSRCzechoslovakia and Russia.
"Country house. 1877" Russia 2012 Postcard, from the Colnect catalog
The oldest postcard added this year is from 1900 from Portugal, "Coimbra-Santa Clara, View". 135 Postcards issued in 2016 have been added to the catalog as well, from 9 different countries.
"Geirangerfjord and 'Seven Sisters' waterfall" Norway Postcard, from the Colnect catalog
Want to help add more Postcards to the catalog? Please see our Postcards Catalog Contribution Guidelines. You can also read more details on contribution to Colnect on the Contributor Guide.
"Summer Palace. Seventeen-arch Bridge" China Postcard, from the Colnect catalog

Monday, August 1, 2016

Coins Reaching 66,666 on Colnect

In an appropriate tribute to the year 2016, we're happy to celebrate Colnect Coins catalog passing the 66,666 Coins mark.



This year we have seen a lot of positive progress for Numismatic collectibles on Colnect. Maybe most importantly, we've seen the addition of the Year Variants in the coins catalog.
1 Mahbub (With rose) Gold Coin from Egypt, 1730, from the Colnect catalog  
With over a thousand new coins added every month, the coins catalog is growing in impressive speed. The speed does not come at the expense of the quality of the catalog, that maintains it's high standards for information and images.
The success of the catalog is due to the impeccable work of the coordinators, Angelo Parla [angelo13] and Hernán Bofill [hbofill12], and the dedicated editors and contributors of the category.
1 Sovereign (Victoria Queen) Gold Coin from Australia, 1855, from the Colnect catalog
If you would like to help add items to the catalog, please see our Catalog Contribution Guidelines page.
500 Dinara (Preserve Planet Earth Series - Brontosaurus) Copper-Nickel Coin from Bosnia and Herzegovina, 1993, from the Colnect catalog
We wish all the best to the catalog that is getting better and better every month. There's a bright and shiny future for this numismatic category.

1 Cent (Silver edition) from Sierra Leone, 1964, from the Colnect catalog

Thursday, July 28, 2016

FreeDNS / NameCheap DNS Servers Attacked / Hacked? Are your domain suddenly directed to 213.184.126.163 ?

UPDATE: following email correspondence with the hosting provider for the IP 213.184.126.163 they have taken down the server there till further notice. At least now users won't be redirected to phishing and malware websites.

Today we were alarmed to find out that our server domains are not resolved properly to their correct IP address but to an IP address we're not familiar with 213.184.126.163

The reason for this issue was that FreeDNS servers have responded with the wrong IP 213.184.126.163 instead of our real IP. To some people, this wrong IP cause a redirect to a malware website! Please comment here if you suffer from a similar issue.

While it seems that, at least in our case FreeDNS now responds properly, the malicious DNS entry has gotten a TTL (Time To Live) of 1 week which means that if the various domain name servers who received the wrong IP are actually obeying this TTL your website may be inaccessible for an entire week!

To check if your domain is resolved properly, you can use a service such as digwebinterface or whatsmydns to check quickly how different DNS worldwide resolve your domain. You can also use dig or nslookup to see quickly what a specific DNS replies.

In a chat with NameCheap they denied being hacked as their support supervisor wrote "I can assure you that our servers have not been hacked.". Well, if not hacked, have they done this on purpose? Getting many of their domains to point to a malware site? Do you smell a lawsuit coming?

Here's a bit of info about the IP used for this hack:

IP Address13.14.166
CityNess Ziona
State/RegionHaMerkaz
Country CodeIL
ISPNet-Style Atarim Ltd

 As for our own website I've posted this message on our forum: http://colnect.com/en/forum/viewtopic!f=6&t=68917&p=192078#p192078

Dear members,

UPDATE: we have posted on our blog about this issue as well.
UPDATE2: if you're on windows try to also launch ipconfig /flushdns from command prompt to ensure your computer is trying to fetch the correct DNS.
UPDATE3: we've updated more entries to the hosts file to ensure all our servers respond properly.


PLEASE SAVE THIS MESSAGE IF YOU SEE IT. If other Colnectors are having trouble please assist them.

DNS is a service that translates a domain name ( such as colnect.com ) to an IP address ( such as 148.251.247.10 which is our main IP ).
One of our DNS providers had problems on their servers. I suspect they've been hacked but are unaware of it. Thereby you may not see Colnect properly and instead get redirected somewhere else.

If this happens you can here are your options:

1/ Close your browser, wait a bit and try again. If it doesn't work then go ahead and flush your DNS cache. However, if your DNS provider didn't get updated yet you may need to follow the next steps.

2/ Update your hosts file manually (explanation) by adding these two lines:

148.251.247.10 colnect.com
148.251.247.9 s.colnect.net
148.251.247.9 i.colnect.net
148.251.247.11 nif.colnect.net


If you choose this option you may want to comment out these lines later as we plan to change IP for colnect.com in the coming days as we upgrade our server.

3/ Set your DNS servers to Google's own 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4 - here's a guide


We are very sorry for this trouble. While their DNS now seems to work well, the bad records showing a different IP address might still be cached on other DNS providers.

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